Commentary: African American Scientists and Inventors
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Garrett Morgan is one of those inventors whos contributions literally change the world. From hair straightner, to the gas mask, Morgan is chiseled into history.
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Garrett Morgan is one of those rare people who are able to come up with an extraordinary inventions which has a tremendous impact on society - and then follows that up with even more!
Garrett Morgan was born on March 4, 1877 in Paris, Kentucky the seventh of 11 children born to Sydney and Elizabeth Morgan. Garrett, at the early age of 14 decided that he should travel north to Ohio in order to receive a better education. He moved to Cincinnati and then to Cleveland, working as a handyman in order to make ends meet. In Cleveland, he learned the inner workings of the sewing machine and in 1907 opened his own sewing machine store, selling new machines and repairing old ones. In 1908 Morgan married Mary Anne Hassek with whom he would have three sons.
In 1909, Morgan opened a tailoring shop, selling coats, suits and dresses. While working in this shop he came upon a discover which brought about his first invention. He noticed that the needle of a sewing machine moved so fast that its friction often scorched the thread of the woolen materials. He thus set out to develop a liquid that would provide a useful polish to the needle, reducing friction. When his wife called him to dinner, he wiped the liquid from his hands onto a a piece of pony-fur cloth. When he returned to his workshop, he saw that the fibers on the cloth were now standing straight up. He theorized that the fluid had actually straightened the fibers....Read More
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The state of Virginia knows it has DNA evidence that may prove the innocence of dozens of men convicted of crimes they didn’t commit. Men just like Barbour. So why won’t the state say who they are? Slate: The Exoneration of Bennett Barbour
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Bennett Barbour was convicted in 1978 of a rape he didn’t commit. At trial, he had an alibi supported by several witnesses. He didn’t match the victim’s description of her attacker. Barbour suffers from a severe bone disease that would have made it nearly impossible for him to be the assailant. Police found no physical evidence connecting him to the crime, beyond the eyewitness identification by his alleged victim. Barbour was handed an 18-year sentence and paroled after nearly five years.
He tells me his time in prison was “a nightmare.” He has cancer now, “all over my body,” and travels regularly to Richmond for treatment. In prison, he says, “everything is taken away. Your pride ...” as his voice trails off. Jonathan Sheldon, a lawyer familiar with his case says, “People think, ‘Oh, he only got five years.’ But in that five years he lost his six-month-old marriage, and scarred his relationship with his daughter. That five years broke him.”
The Commonwealth of Virginia learned that Bennett Barbour was innocent nearly two years ago, when DNA testing cleared him of the crime. Virginia authorities, however, never informed Barbour of his innocence. (State officials claim to have mailed a letter with the test results to Barbour’s last four known addresses, but none of those letters ever reached him.) Barbour learned of the DNA tests that proved his innocence only last month, on Feb. 5, when he received a phone call from Sheldon. “I was with my nephew playing cards, and Mr. Sheldon called my mother’s house looking for me,” says Barbour. “He said the authorities stopped looking for me because they couldn’t find me. But Sheldon found me in two days using the Internet.”
Actually, that’s not true. It only took Sheldon a few hours.
Bennett Barbour is one of the fortunate ones. He, unlike what may ultimately amount to dozens of other men wrongly convicted and incarcerated by the state of Virginia, knows that his innocence can be conclusively proved. His lawyers at the University of Virginia’s Innocence Project filed paperwork last week to have the state formally declare him innocent.
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Bennett Barbour as a younger man
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It was no surprise that the Department of Justice blocked Texas’s photo voter ID law yesterday. Texas Republicans’s reaction was also no surprise. They’re pissed, though it’s hard to believe they are really shocked. Colorlines: DOJ Texas Voter ID Ruling Is No Surprise Given State’s Faulty ‘Colorblind’ Policies.
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Like South Carolina, Texas was a state subject to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act for its history of voter discrimination against African Americans. This means Texas needs clearance from DOJ to institute any new voter laws so their discriminatory past is never revisited. Texas’s photo voter ID law was rejected due to the discriminatory effect it would have on Hispanic voters, given that a significantly greater portion of them lack ID and lack the means to obtain ID, meaning the law amounts to a poll tax.
Hardly a plot twist. In fact moving forward, let’s agree now that there will be more states that pass photo voter ID laws, and more rejections from DOJ or courts in at least some of those cases. Here’s what will follow:
•Organizations fighting to protect voting rights will applaud the blocks, citing that certain populations would be disenfranchised under voter ID laws, and in most cases the data will support them.
•Republicans will cry foul saying that “voter fraud” compels the state to have voter ID laws. In most if not all cases the data will not support them.
•Some Republicans will say that the Obama administration is impeding on states’ rights while other Republicans will hint that Democrats are trying to steal the November 2012 elections. Those same Republicans will push to have voter ID laws reinstated by the November 2012 elections.
The Details in Texas
This DOJ ruling was not a surprise to Texas. Texas sued the federal government last year in anticipation of being rejected. Nonetheless, Texas Republicans were appalled by DOJ’s decision yesterday. Sen. John Cornyn said it “reeks of politics,” which is, at best, dishonest. Texas understood it needed clearance under the Voting Rights Act as a covered jurisdiction. It also knew what it had to do to make its case for why the voter ID should fly.
But when it came time to supply the numbers requested by DOJ to make an empirical decision about the law, Texas lunched. They supplied two sets of numbers of registered Hispanic voters thought to lack photo ID without bothering to reconcile either.
Wrote Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez to Texas’s director of elections Keith Ingram, “The state has not provided an explanation for the disparate results. More significantly, it declined to offer an opinion on which of the two data sets is more accurate.”
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Why Sterling Cooper was particularly afraid of black America—and why Season 5 may finally put race front and center. Slate: Mad Men and Black America
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In everything from their pop-culture references to their meticulous production design, the creators of Mad Men are famously obsessive about the show’s historical accuracy. So it hardly seems possible they would be faithful in their use of period-appropriate underwear yet flub the entire history of race in advertising. In truth, the show is not only accurate in depicting the racial history of the industry, it is spot on in depicting that history as it relates to a place like Sterling Cooper, which is fundamental to the basic premise of the show.
In the early 1950s, BBDO hired Clarence Holte, making him the first black man ever to work at a major New York ad agency. But Holte was retained to serve as a liaison to black newspapers and radio. The color line for blacks to work on “white” advertising wasn’t broken until 1955, when Young & Rubicam hired musician Roy Eaton as a copywriter and composer. In 1960, BBDO also hired graphic designer Georg Olden, a pioneering black creative who’d designed the logo for CBS television and who would go on to be a vice president at McCann-Erickson. A handful of other Jackie Robinson-type figures were making inroads here and there, but for several years that was about it.
Evidence of this would come to light on April 22, 1963. Just weeks after Martin Luther King was arrested in Birmingham, Ala., Advertising Age published the results of a survey by the Urban League that covered minority employment at Madison Avenue’s 10 largest agencies. “Urban League Hits N.Y. Agencies on Racial Discrimination in Employment,” ran the trade paper’s headline. Out of over 20,000 employees, the report identified only 25 blacks working in any kind of professional or creative capacity, i.e., nonclerical or custodial. (To put this in the context of Mad Men’s calendar: The Urban League’s dismal report would have been issued exactly two weeks before the events depicted in the third episode of the show’s third season—that being the episode wherein Roger Sterling dons blackface and sings, “Tis summer, and the darkies are gay” at his country club’s Derby Day Party. This was also the episode in which Sally Draper and grandpa Gene read aloud from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Do we need any further proof that Matthew Weiner knows exactly what he’s doing?)
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Don Draper trying to share a cigarette and a little conversation with a black bus boy in Mad Men's pilot episode
Photograph courtesy © AMC 2012.
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I've written many times before progressives need to think about diversity when they start organizations and not spend so much time trying to fix them afterwards. Colorlines: How Are Racial Justice Activists Making Occupy Work For Everyone? [Video]
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Last fall, the Occupy Wall Street movement gripped the world as activists, organizers and plain frustrated folks of all stripes took to the streets and parks of cities everywhere in a strikingly visual demand for change. But the optics of the movement also sparked an ongoing, often difficult discussion over the role people of color have played and should play within the movement. It’s a conversation that will surely remain a core part of the discussion when, as expected, Occupy actions and protests re-emerge with vigor this spring and summer.
So in two-part video series, we’ve asked people of color who are participating in and helping to shape the Occupy movement about their experiences. It’s important to stress, of course, that the movement for economic justice amid this crippling recession is an old one that has for years been led by the communities of color most impacted by it. That work has and will continue. But where do people of color fit within the context of the Occupy movement specifically? And beyond diversity, has the movement embraced a racial justice agenda?
In this short video, shot primarily during the fall 2011 heat of Occupy Wall Street, Colorlines.com’s Monica Novoa hits the streets to speak with various activists who stepped into the Occupy movement in an effort to bring race to the forefront of the discussion there. Participants in OWS’s People of Color Working Group and the Occupy the Hood movement discuss what they saw as OWS’s initial “post-racial” attitude toward the economic crisis and how white privilege may have impacted the movement’s development and sustainability. They also describe how racial justice activists have addressed those concerns and the need for continued work within the Occupy movement.
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Although I laud any effort aimed at stopping the LRA, this is part of the reason for these criticism. Colorlines: Kony 2012’s Success Shows There’s Big Money Attached to White Saviors.
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It’s impossible to write a blueprint for what makes anything go viral, but the Kony 2012 does share some important traits with its viral predecessors: it told a simple story in a compelling way and got a lot of famous people to tell it, too.
“It’s a very specific example of connecting a really big metanarrative of technology and change and generational potential with a very high-impact, emotional, personalized story,” says Patrick Reinsborough, executive director of SmartMeme, a group that follows viral stories on the Internet. “It provides a sense of collective agency for folks.”
The campaign itself is centered around a 30 minute video by filmmaker and Invisible Children co-founder Jason Russell. In it, Russell attempts to explain to his 5-year-old son that Joseph Kony is an evil man who kidnaps children and turns them into ruthless soldiers who kill their parents. In using this technique to explain the situation to his son, Russell is also informing the viewer. It’s one of our culture’s most common storytelling narratives: there’s an evil man who does terrible things to innocent people—often children—and he must be stopped.
From there, Invisible Children asks its viewers to get involved. They can make a tax deductible donation of at least $10, purchase the group’s $10 Kony bracelet, or buy a $30 action kit that includes the bracelet, a t-shirt, stickers, buttons and an action guide.
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One of the most glaring omissions from the video is that it’s missing the perspectives of Africans as anything but victims.
“It’s propaganda for a western viewer,” says Tavia Nyong’o, associate professor of performance studies at New York University. “Any African watching it feels very strongly like we’re not in the picture—there’s no African complexity, and there’s certainly no African agency.”
Within days, Ugandan journalist Rosebell Kagumire rose to the top of a chorus of African voices criticizing the campaign.
“It simplifies the story of millions of people in northern Uganda and makes out a narrative that is often hard about Africa, about how hopeless people are in times of conflict,” Kagumire said of the Kony 2012 video. “If you are showing me as voiceless, as hopeless, you have no space telling my story, you shouldn’t be telling my story.”
The absence of Ugandans, specifically, and East Africans more generally isn’t just a matter of aesthetics. It informs the content, particularly on an issue that’s as complicated and politically nuanced as that of Joseph Kony and the widespread violence that’s plagued Uganda.
“The way they present the facts and information and history of the conflict and their solution is not something that is by any means the common point of view amongst Ugandans,” says Nyong’o. “They say it’s ‘not about politics and it’s not about the economy’ [in the video], but it’s actually all about politics and the economy.”
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The International Criminal Court (ICC) has found the Congolese warlord, Thomas Lubanga, guilty of recruiting and using child soldiers between 2002 and 2003. BBC: ICC finds Congo warlord Thomas Lubanga guilty
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It is the court's first verdict since it was set up 10 years ago. He will be sentenced at a later hearing.
He headed a rebel group during an inter-ethnic conflict in a gold-rich region of Democratic Republic of Congo.
The prosecution accused him of using children as young as nine as bodyguards and fighters.
In a unanimous decision, the three judges said evidence proved that as head of the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC) and its armed wing, Lubanga bore responsibility for the recruitment of child soldiers under the age of 15 who had participated actively on the frontline.
The BBC's Kasim Kayira at the hearing said Lubanga, who was arrested in 2005, was expressionless as the verdict was read out.
He has the right to appeal against his conviction on the three charges of recruiting children, enlisting children into rebel militia and using children in combat.
He could face between 25 and 30 years in jail as the prosecution asked for "close to the maximum" sentence.
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Thomas Lubanga was arrested by UN peacekeepers in 2005 and sent to stand trial in The Hague.
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Unfortunately racism manifest in many countries and cultures even one that pride themselves on "color blindness". TheGreatestNews: Brazilian Student Barred Entry to University for Wearing “Black Power” Natural Hairstyle
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The secretary of state of the northeastern state of Maranhão is investigating an alleged crime of racism against a 19-year old woman. Ana Carolina Bastos, a student of the Unidade Integrada Estado do Pará, on the outskirts of the capital city of São Luís, reported that she was barred from class by the director of the school on the first day of class.
According to Bastos, on February 23rd, the director, Socorro Bohatem, stopped her at the entrance of the school and told her that she was dressed in an “inadequate” way. Following an objection by Ana Carolina, who defended herself by saying that another young, (white) girl, wore a more low-cut dress than hers and was not barred, to which the director explained that she could not get into school because of the “black power” hairstyle. According to the student, the director was astonished by her choice of hairstyle, asked why she wore her hair “in that way” and told her leave the building. “The other student wore a top and a very low-cut dress. It was my style that didn’t please her. It was a case of racism. Later I found out that this was not the first time something like this happened”, said the student.
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A little Friday Music "Portrait of Louis Armstrong - Wynton Marsalis"
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The Front Porch is now open!
Grab a seat and get a plate! If you are new-introduce yourself and join in.
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